Monero (XMR)

Cryptocurrency with focus on anonymity. Was almost certainly the leading privacy coin since its inception until as of writing in the 2020s.

Ciro Santilli has received and held considerable quantities of Monero, notably 1000 Monero donation. so bias alert.

As mentioned at Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?", Ciro Santilli believes that anonymity is the most valuable feature that really matters on crypto coins, and therefore if he were to invest in crypto, he would invest in Monero or some other privacy coin.

localmonero.co/knowledge/monero-stealth-addresses?language=en gives an overview of the privacy mechanisms:

ring signatures, which hide the true output (sender)
localmonero.co/knowledge/ring-signatures Gives an overview. Mentions that it is prone to heuristic attacks.
Uses a system of decoys, that adds 10 fake possible previous outputs as inputs, in addition to the actual input.
So the network only knows/verifies that one of those 11 previous outputs was used, but it does not know which one.
It's a bit like having a built-in cryptocurrency tumbler in every transaction.
TODO so how do you know which previous outputs were spent or not?
RingCT which hides the amounts.
stealth addresses, which hides who you send to
This forces receivers to scan try and unlock every single transaction in the chain to see if it is theirs or not.
The sender therefore can know when the money is spent, but once again, not to whom it is being sent.

Based on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote and like Satoshi Nakamoto created by under the pseudonym "Nicolas van Saberhagen" www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7v2obe/offering_a_bounty_for_a_video_of_the_speech_by/

Coinbase has actually stayed away from trading it even as of 2019 when Monero was the third largest market capitalization crypto because of fear of regulatory slashback: decrypt.co/36731/heres-why-coinbase-still-hasnt-listed-monero. Although it must be said, the value of privacy crypto is greatly reduced when everyone is trading it on exchanges, which require a passport upload to work.

Table of contents

Monero mining

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Monero ASIC resistance

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TODO is it or is it not??? In any case, it is good to see devs actually trying it:

Googling does not lead to any commercial ASICs on sale that is not just a CPU or as efficient as certain CPUs, so perhaps they've actually manged it!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPrzH_loOg
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJMzWhAr8aI talks about the "Bitmain Antminer X5", but it's just a box with CPUs

Monero GPU mining

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Did RandomX really succeed? If so, they are true heroes.

RandomX

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www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/randomx.html

This innovative POW is optimized for CPUs and it's based on execution of random code and other memory-heavy techniques.

How to mine Monero

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Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:

sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)

At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:

xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>

Seems simple, well done devs!

Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:

./xmrig --bench=1M

gives:

948.1 h/s

which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.

So clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.

Some people considering Raspberry Pis also conclude obviously that it is useless at a 10H/s rate:

www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!